Nashville experiences

Two of our songwriting group recently returned from Nashville. A few of their comments that I noted were:

- It was a great learning experience.
- The main thing they accomplished was making contacts and learning about songwriting Nashville style.
- Songwriting is treated like any other business, songs need to be written to match the needs of the client. While everyone say that they want something different, if it does match the formula it needs to be really amazing to get listened to.
- Songs need to be much shorter, have a strong hook that's repeated, and follow a format like V C V C B C (with some flexibility).
- There are over 300 songs writing per week in Nashville, so it's as much who you know as what you know.
- Both had demos of their songs made in Nashville. It was really weird hearing our friends songs country-fied. If you're pitching in Nashville, your pitching country songs... Also, there's a big difference between demo shops, so do your homework.
- Co-writing is strongly encouraged and there is no shortage of people offering to do a cowrite on one of your existing songs. The trick is to get a co-write situation that works for you. (see my earlier postings on co-writing)

Listening to their comments, it sounds like something that I may want to do.